First, thanks to everyone who has been patient with us while we assumed stewardship of WaveMaker. I’ll admit that community communications has not been our strong suit. However, we are increasing our communications efforts with the goal of improving in 2014. In particular, I think we have not conveyed our commitment to WaveMaker clearly enough. To give some perspective, we have a development team working just on WaveMaker that is larger than I believe WaveMaker has ever had and literally at least 10 times the size of VMware’s WaveMaker team. We’ve taken on some lofty goals, big enough perhaps to worry some folks. But we took on WaveMaker because we see big potential. And we did make very good progress with the product last year, which I believe will poise WaveMaker and its large community of partners and customers for bigger things this year.

Community Platform

Picking up some of the operational pieces (code, web site, forum, doc, download repositories, ticket tracking system, training materials, wiki, etc.) took a bit more effort than you might think. And we are looking to modernize some of the community technologies this year.

Version 6.6

In about half a year, we completed several 6.6 releases, including milestone releases and final GA in November. We’ve provided example apps for session and login management, and we’ve been delivering support and training for WaveMaker users.

Version 6.7

We also released public beta of 6.7, or what we call “WaveMaker Cloud™” (wavemakercloud.com). With WaveMaker Cloud, we added the second “D” to RADD (Rapid Application Development and Deployment). We made it super-simple to deploy your WaveMaker app right from Studio to the cloud with a single-click. Via the CloudJee platform, we also give you a year free hosting (running on AWS) to try it out! Note: 6.7 continues to be open source, and you can still use 6.7 to develop offline just as you do with 6.6; our goal is not to lock you in, but to provide the easiest, self-service, no-ops way to build and deliver great cloud and mobile apps. We can provide a number of optional services for hosting WaveMaker applications such as choice of cloud providers, increased resources, SLA, etc.

In a little over a month last year, WaveMaker Cloud (6.7) has had thousands of downloads with hundreds of deployed instances from over 70 countries!

Version 7.0

With several years in the market, WaveMaker has been able to build a strong loyal following. However, WaveMaker is also due for some modernization. It’s our intent with our version 7 to:

a) modernize the Studio user experience,

b) modernize the framework to current popular technologies; this will also facilitate faster development of new features,

c) do so without losing the power that makes WaveMaker so popular – including but not limited to back-end services integration, extensibility, browser-based, local/on-prem dev, open source, etc.

In our July webinar, we announced our intent to replace Dojo with AngularJS as a step towards these goals. We did not take this decision lightly; we understood that this is not a trivial undertaking. And we understand that some, particularly those with big investments in Dojo, might be less happy with this move. Someone even suggested that we made this decision because our skillsets lie in AngularJS, not Dojo. Actually, we have a lot of experience with Dojo, having built a previous product on Dojo. However, we recognize that market demand is moving in a different direction. Just search for “Top Javascript frameworks”. AngularJS is a front runner on just about every list. We’ve put dozens of engineers on this task, and I’ve already seen an internal preview. We expect a release by Q2.

We expect the 7.0 platform to take us into the future. Just as airlines tell parents to ensure they put their oxygen masks on first in an emergency, we find the community generally understands that WaveMaker has to be commercially viable for WaveMaker to not only survive, but thrive. Thus, 7.0 will continue to have an open source version, but will also have an enterprise version. Features for the enterprise version are yet to be determined, but team development, collaboration, deeper security seem like obvious areas.

One of the features in 7.0 that I am most excited about is what we are currently calling API “Prefabs”. These are components specific to an API that can be easily used and reused in WaveMaker apps. A simple example might be a login Prefab for WorkDay (HR SaaS application) that can not only provide a consistent UI, but can perform all the required backend authentication handshaking. Developers and non-developers can then drag and drop this login Prefab into their WaveMaker apps. Then, the community will be able to build and share Prefabs for various APIs and platforms. We would like to hear from you which Prefabs you would like to see.

We will continue to support 6.6 for the foreseeable future. Version 6.7 functionality (auto cloud deployment) will merge with 7.0. Our goal is to provide migration tools for moving as much of 6.6 apps to 7.0 as feasible.

Special thanks to the loyal WaveMaker community and welcome to all the new users who discover WaveMaker each day and send us their praises for WaveMaker. Together, let’s make some waves in 2014! :)

5 Comments

are you going to ADD new features in those areas to the new “7 enterprise”, or are you going to REMOVE some features in those areas to the new “7 open source”?

Thanks, Marco

Giuseppe

January 9, 2014 at 8:08 am ·

Happy new year for all of you Samir,

Prefabs looks good. And Enterprise version is understable, always if not locks standard development. I mean, for example, WM community has a security builtin over database, and Enterprise version a security service against LDAP or SSO.

Maybe we could chat again.

Regards.

Oscar

January 9, 2014 at 10:51 am ·

We expect the next Community version to still be Apache licensed at least …

We can understand a paid Enterprise version with “team enhancements” for example.

If not, just “too much changes” and can burn-out all the current community members that work alone or in quite small teams …

I think some Prefabs are interesting. Paypal (automatize price, account and redirects to pay) or Email (from, to, title, body, attachs and send…) …. But I don’t get the point to others. I understand Prefabs as something like package of widgets and services, thath with a little config to get something specific to work. Integration with eCommerce systems (Magento, Prestashop), or as you say, Paypal, but for example, Point of Sale is more like a complete application than a Prefab itself.

Regards.

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